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In our recent study, nearly 90% of marketers said that they will increase their investment in AI this year. One of the main goals they listed for increasing their AI budgets was to “improve their ROAS.” Is your team following suit? If don’t make the most of the AI tools available to you, there’s a good chance you’ll fall behind competitors who do. Is the FoMO setting in yet?
The good news is that there is no shortage of AI solutions you can use to boost productivity, optimise your budget, and ultimately drive more revenue. One of the most impactful AI tools at any marketer’s disposal is Google Ads Smart Bidding. In this post, we’ll show you 5 impactful Smart Bidding tips you can use to increase revenue. We’ll also show you how you can pair Google’s AI with Invoca’s conversation intelligence AI to supercharge your return on ad spend.
Smart Bidding is Google Ads’ AI-powered bidding tool. It automatically makes the most efficient bids to meet your campaign goals in real time. Because it’s powered by artificial intelligence, Smart Bidding can place and adjust bids in milliseconds, spotting patterns it would take humans far longer to uncover. Not only does Smart Bidding maximise the impact of your budget, but it also frees up your team to work on other high-impact projects.
Whether you’re a Google Ads newbie or a seasoned expert, the tips below can help you optimise your campaigns to drive more revenue for your company.
Google Ads Smart Bidding offers various goal options available to cater to your different marketing objectives. Choosing the best Smart Bidding goal option depends on your specific campaign goals, budget, and timeline. Below are a few different options Google offers:
If you only care about driving more conversions, the "Conversions” strategy may be ideal for you. If you’re focused strictly on revenue, choose the “Enhanced conversions” strategy. For cost efficiency, "Target CPA" and "Target ROAS" are your best bets. Remember, it's crucial to continually monitor and analyse the performance of your chosen Smart Bidding strategy. You can adjust your bids as needed to ensure you're achieving your desired results.
Google recently launched two new AI tools to help marketers take Smart Bidding performance to the next level. You can pair these tools with your desired bidding strategy to expand your reach. Here’s what they are and how they work:
By pairing Broad Match with your chosen Smart Bidding model, you can maximise your query coverage on Google search. By adding Performance Max to the mix, you can expand beyond search to Google’s vast advertising network, which includes YouTube, display, Google Maps, and more.
Artificial intelligence is only as effective as the data you fuel it with. Its value is in its ability to recognise and act on patterns far faster than the human brain. The issue many marketers face is that they aren’t giving Google’s Smart Bidding algorithm a complete data set to work with. They’re only tracking the online conversions their campaigns drive, while neglecting phone call conversions. This can be a major problem, as our research shows that in many high-stakes purchase industries, 20-50% of conversions come in over the phone.
If you’re not tracking all of those phone call conversions, your Google Smart Bidding instance is likely underperforming. That’s because automated bidding tools work by tracking the number of conversions each ad variation is driving and then optimising bids based on what’s performing best. If you’re not tracking the phone call conversions your ads drive, you’re not giving the tool a full picture of your performance. As a result, it could be allocating too many marketing dollars to underperforming ads or failing to prioritize ads that are driving a high volume of phone leads.
Invoca conversation intelligence solves this all-too-common problem. It integrates with Google Ads, allowing you to stream call conversion data to the platform in real time. This allows Google’s smart bidding algorithm to make better, more informed bids on your behalf, regardless of what your campaign goals may be and which bidding strategy you use. It compounds the gains you receive from Google’s AI to take your revenue generation to the next level.
If you’re using Google Ads’ call tracking feature, you have a better idea of how well your campaigns are performing than you would by flying blind. Google Ads can show how many total calls your campaigns drive, but bear in mind it can only count calls and can’t determine call outcomes, so many of those calls might not be conversions. They could be customer service calls, people asking about operating hours, calling for driving directions, or even callers with the wrong number.
Here’s an example of how using call volume instead of conversion volume to optimise campaigns throws everything off. If you’re just looking at call volume, you would put your money behind the “Corp Bank Trust” keyword. But once you can see the conversions that happen on the phone, you’ll see you put the money in the wrong place as “first-time mortgage” was driving more conversions.
If you want a truly accurate picture of campaign performance you need conversation intelligence. Tools like Invoca use artificial intelligence to determine not just that calls occurred, but also if those calls were leads, if the caller converted, and how much revenue was generated. This also allows you to allocate your marketing budget more efficiently, so you can double down on the campaigns driving the most revenue growth.
Optimising your bidding strategy isn’t the only way to drive more revenue from Google Ads — another key lever is to enhance your ad retargeting. Your marketing dollars go much further when you serve ads to people who have previously engaged with your brand and are already interested, rather than starting from scratch. You can drive more conversions at a lower cost when your messaging aligns with your audience’s preferences and past buying behaviors.
First-party data is the backbone of a successful ad retargeting strategy — the more of it you have at your fingertips, the better you can anticipate your customers’ needs and preferences. With conversation intelligence, you can tap into one of the richest available sources of first-party data: phone conversations.
Phone conversations contain more insights than an online form fill ever could — when your customers call you, they tell you about their needs, preferences, and how to make them happy. Conversation intelligence AI analyses these conversations at scale and mines them for insights. The beauty of Invoca’s Signal AI Studio is that you can easily train the AI to capture whichever data points are most relevant to your business — for example, you can track products callers expressed interest in, if they were price-sensitive, and if they made a purchase. Check out the graphic below to see more of the data points you can collect with Invoca:
With these deep conversation insights, you can build more complete customer profiles and retarget leads with more relevant, higher-converting ads. Below are a few common examples of retargeting and suppression strategies marketers use with Invoca’s first-party data:
Many Google Ads users are flushing their budgets down the drain without even knowing it. They’re spending thousands of dollars to drive phone leads to their locations or contact centres, but a huge portion of those calls are going unanswered, translating to wasted ad spend. In other cases, the calls are getting answered, but sales agents aren’t using the right scripts and talk tracks to convert them to revenue. These issues can become very costly if left unchecked.
Leading brands use Invoca reports to detect when call experience issues are hurting their Google Ads results. Invoca shows you the total number of calls your Google Ads campaigns send to each location or contact centre, how many calls were answered, the name of the agent that handled the call, how many calls were leads, and how many were successfully converted to revenue.
If you notice certain locations or contact centres have high unanswered call rates, you can collaborate with them to improve call routing procedures and staffing. If you learn certain agents have low phone call conversion rates, you can review their call recordings and transcripts to learn the cause and notify their managers to help them improve. When you work with your contact centres and locations to correct these issues, you’ll increase conversion rates and revenue from your Google Ads campaigns.
Below is a sample Invoca report showing call handling by location:
A great example of Invoca’s Google Ads integration comes from Rogers Communications, Canada’s largest telecom company. Rogers used Invoca’s AI to understand not just which customers converted over the phone, but the average value of the conversion for each customer type.
With this data, they were able to understand the revenue that each paid search campaign, ad, and keyword was driving — both online and over the phone. They could then feed this revenue data into Google Ads to inform Smart Bidding. Smart Bidding weighs their bids in proportion to their returns, decreasing their cost per acquisition by 82%. They also achieved an 18% lift in net revenue from paid search.
“The results with Invoca have been phenomenal, to say the least,” said Farrell. “The benefits are constantly compounding with such minimal lift for the returns. I’ve never had a product where I spend more time selling people on the results than doing the work to get it going.”
Read the full Rogers Communications case study here
Want to learn more about how Invoca’s Google Ads integration can help you drive more revenue? Check out these resources:
Want to see Invoca in action? Request your personalised demo today.
